The representation of stress: evidence from an aphasic patient

We report the case of an aphasic patient who, following an acquired lesion involving the left temporo-parietal cortex, produced many word stress errors in spontaneous speech, naming of objects and reading aloud. The stress impairment concerned exclusively words in which stress was unpredictable on the basis of syllabic structure, and was equally severe in naming and reading aloud. Errors were significantly more frequent in the cases of words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, and of low frequency words. There was a high consistency between errors in naming and reading aloud. These findings suggest that stress representation can be selectively impaired after brain damage; we hypothesise that a partial disorder at the level of the form lexicon, involving the representation of lexical stress, can account for most of the features of the patient's performance.